Whenever folks say radical Christianity is "a phase" of youth, I tell them they need to meet our 80-year-old nun or my friend Tony Campolo.

This is the company we keep when it comes to the death penalty: China, the number one executing country; Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, those are the top 4, and number 5 is the US. And those are not countries that are known as champions for human rights, you know.

Tony Campolo and I both speak a lot, and we began to notice that there were some crowds of old folks that desperately needed some youthful energy, and there were other crowds of young folks that desperately needed some aged wisdom.

It is the church's responsibility, the government's responsibility, and the personal responsibility of every one of us to love.

I moved to Philadelphia to go to school at Eastern partly because I wanted to study the Bible and I also went to study sociology. I like how Karl Barth said we have to read the Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other so that our faith doesn't just become a ticket into heaven and a license to ignore the world around us.

I would love to see the Church on the right side of history.

We can ignore suffering no matter where we live. There are people who live a few miles from me who never see much poverty or the injustices that live on our doorstep.